Local IT partner provides “peace of mind” for Markham team

With a portfolio of high-profile projects, Markham is a Hawke’s Bay-based company that’s built a solid reputation supplying additives to enhance the strength, durability, curing and waterproofing performance of concrete. 

Markham has provided concrete treatment solutions for well-known projects throughout New Zealand and Australia. These include Napier Port, Waikato Hospital, Commercial Bay Tower and the Waterview Tunnel in Auckland, and the Cronulla Seawall and Perth Concert Hall in Australia.

What began as a father-son business 25 years ago with an 0800 number and a fax machine has grown into a 65-person company. With that growth, Markham has looked to embrace technology to manage the increased volume in business.

CFO Manton Collings says that while its IT needs are not that complex, with staff working in its Hawke’s Bay headquarters, a Sydney sales office, and in Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, the company needs robust communication, finance, project management and quality assurance systems.    

“Our head office, back-office functions and New Zealand sales team are based in Napier, and we have sales teams and applicators throughout Australia, so a large part of our workforce is remote and all these people have IT needs,” says Collings.  

In the past, Markham struggled to find good IT support. Its ageing infrastructure also needed updating and the company was looking to upgrade its physical servers to a cloud-based platform. 

In December 2023, Markham signed up for Datacom’s new Unify Managed Service. It now has a dedicated, local advisor and an experienced IT engineer who act as the primary contact between Markham and Datacom’s Unify team. 

“Our requirement was a local presence – someone that’s available and can pop in if needed,” explains Collings. “Datacom also has the scale to provide that necessary knowledge and IT expertise. Being a smaller business, we like having someone we can quickly contact for personal attention.”

Markham has transitioned from its own on-site servers to the cloud-based Microsoft Sharepoint platform to store, share and manage its digital information. 

“Datacom gave us clarity on what this new system would look like and used their expertise in Sharepoint to set things up for us and do some of the major migration work, saving us a lot of time. It’s also reassuring to have everything off the old systems before the servers fall over.”

Before committing, Markham worked with Datacom to do an evaluation of its IT needs to ensure the Unify Managed Service was the right choice. It opted for a pay-as-you-use service, which Collings says is cost-effective and fit for purpose. 

“The staff love it. We’ve gone from a self-service system of raising a ticket with the provider if you had a problem to having a designated IT-literate staff member who works with Datacom. We can self-diagnose to a certain extent, but we know if something major happens, we can call our local Datacom advisor or engineer and we know we’re in good hands.”

Robust cybersecurity is crucial for every business. Protecting its intellectual property, securing its networks against hacking, and avoiding nasty surprises is essential for Markham. A unique feature of Datacom’s Unify Managed Service is the real-time remote management and monitoring (RMM) of all of a company’s workstations, servers, network storage and firewalls. If one of Markham’s devices has a problem, Datacom receives an alert and can remotely quarantine the device to avoid damage to the network until the issue is resolved.

During the recent global CrowdStrike outage, to ensure minimal disruption to BAU the following week, Datacom visited Markham’s head office over the weekend to assess the impact of the outage on the customer site, ensuring the environment was returned to an optimal and secure state.

“It was great to have someone on the pulse and looking after our systems,” says Collings. “We’ve definitely noticed security gains and we have peace of mind that things are running as they should be, rather than just assuming they’ll be OK.”

Unify gives you a local senior technical resource who acts as a pseudo-IT manager or virtual Chief Information Officer (vCIO). Serving as a single point of contact, they can advise on best practices, risk mitigation, and strategic planning of your IT landscape.   

Coupled with the Unify trusted advisor, Unify’s vCIO platform provides strategic guidance, IT roadmap development, technology evaluation, and digital transformation support. It includes performance monitoring and reporting for optimal IT management.  

Unify also provides baseline monitoring, alerting, support and cybersecurity tools and practices. All Unify Managed Services include Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) technology teamed with Datacom’s New Zealand and Australian-based 24x7 Cyber Defence Operations Centre. 

Remote support for Windows desktops is also provided, including authentication, network printing, wireless connections, internet issues, and desktop performance. Unify ensures that Windows servers and desktops are well maintained and securely patched with critical and non-critical updates.